I'm wondering are you following the Treyvon Martin case? Or lack thereof?

The bully inside: Women who can't take a compliment Why so many have a tough time graciously accepting praise I recently approached a woman in my local gym, admiring her turn at the weight machines. "Wow, you are really strong," I said. "That's an awesome amount of weight." She looked at me blankly. "What's wrong with it?" "Nothing," I responded. "It's just impressive." “What do you mean by that?," she asked, eyeing me. "Uh, I don't know," I stammered, flummoxed. "I mean…It’s great. I just…anyway…O.K. then.” And I backed away slowly. This sort of thing happens all the time. I once complimented a retail clerk’s hands -- no kidding, she had gorgeous hands -- and you would’ve thought I had just handed her a mash note. Recently health writer Leslie Goldman addressed the issue of female discomfort upon receiving a compliment in her Healthbreaksloose blog. When another woman complimented Goldman’s legs Goldman said “‘Oh my God, are you kidding me?! My legs are covered with spider veins!’” Why, Goldman wrote, do women have such a tough time graciously accepting praise and simply saying thanks? In Goldman's view, the pressure to reject a compliment is ingrained in women from an early age. "I think women are just kind of raised to seem humble," Goldman told Kathie Lee and Hoda on TODAY Wednesday. Developmental psychologist Dr. Robyn Silverman suggests that at least when it comes to compliments about a woman’s appearance, an “inner body bully” makes women deny that the flattery could be true. "[It] tells us we're not thin enough, we're not good enough and not worthy enough to take the compliment and so we downgrade it," Silverman, author of "Good Girls Don't Get Fat" told TODAY. Read more: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44340053/ns/today-today_health/

I'm half-way through The Kitchen House .... so far so good, but I have a feeling the book will be a sad tale in the end. What are you reading?

Miss Lori thinks we are all responsible for the sexualization of children like Isabella Barrett from Toddlers and Tiaras .... I think this is a must read for everyone. http://www.misslori.tv/2012/02/07/miss-lori-thinks-we-are-responsible-for-sexualization-of-children-like-isabella-from-toddlers-and-tiaras/

Life is What Happens When You’re Busy Making Plans After falling ass backwards into marriage with a wonderful man, really more than I could have ever asked for in a person to love me, 5 years later I was getting a little worried. I wasn’t worried about the marriage; it was rock solid with the exception of one not so small issue. I had always known what I wanted in life. There was no time frame on any of it but I knew, in my heart, that I would be married with children and successful at whatever I chose to pursue. Yes, my self-confidence runneth over. One small problem, I met the man of my dreams when I was least expecting it. He asked me to marry him, when I was even less expecting it. I said yes, to the shock of myself and everyone else. You see where I am going with this? Life just kept tossing me those lovely wonderful curve balls. I went with it and it all seemed to be playing out perfectly. My life was everything I never knew I’d always wanted, served on a silver platter. One thing was missing, a baby. It wasn’t missing because I had misplaced it or some unfortunate fertility issues. We weren’t so busy with our careers that we had forgotten about it. What happened was I married a man who wasn’t sure if he wanted children or not. I know it sounds crazy that I would have even considered marriage when I was so certain about this one aspect of my life. I knew I needed to be a mother, at some point, the way I know I need to breathe air. But he wasn’t totally sure that he didn’t want children, I am an eternal optimist, and we took a chance. Actually, I’d say it was more like the biggest gamble of my life because if things hadn’t worked out as they did, my story would be very different. Probably a lot more like Elizabeth Gilbert’s and a lot less like Truthful Mommy’s. I remember feeling a lot of trepidation the summer of 2004. It had finally sunk it that maybe this wasn’t going to happen and then big decisions were going to have to be made. Decisions that neither of us wanted to even consider. So we vaguely discussed and kind of decided to plan to plan to have a baby. You know…maybe sometime in that not pre determined future. Personally, in retrospect, I think we were biding our time. He was trying to put off something he still wasn’t sure about and I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was trying and praying to keep hope alive in my heart. That was the summer of our 5-year anniversary. We planned a romantic getaway to New Orleans. It was magical. I’m sure it had a lot to do with the “we’re on vacation” mojo and the ginormous hurricanes they serve in the French Quarter but we had a heart to heart and decided that we were both on board to plan to plan to have our mythical baby…one of these days. We walked around the Garden district holding hands and talking about how awesome it would be to live there. Spent nights walking together, gazing at the stars, eating rich foods on Jazz cruises in the Mississippi. We lingered in the French Quarter drinking all that life had to offer before coming back to our hotel to bask in one another’s love multiple times* wink*wink* Then we returned home. Our marriage stronger than ever, our faith in each other renewed, our love undivided and then…I started puking and puking….and puking some more. Our plan to plan had been foiled and replaced by actual living in the now! We were both scared witless and excited. Me more excited him more scared witless. For a couple months, I was wondering how this was all going to play out. Don’t get me wrong, he was very involved. We did everything together. I read the pregnancy journal to him every night, so we knew what was going on with our baby. He read and sang to my belly. He was at every appointment. He got choked up at the heartbeat. He catered to my every pregnancy whim. He did everything right but for some reason. I felt like he felt like I had sprung this on him. I was too afraid to bring it up because, honestly, I was afraid of what his answer was going to be. Then I wasn’t sure if it was really fear or some kind of crazy hormonal paranoia. So I just went on basking in my glow and praying every night that he REALLY was too. It felt too good to be true, so I was sure some thing was afoot. Then 3 days before Christmas we went to have a 3-D confirmation ultrasound done because I HAD to know what the sex of the baby was going to be. They had told me a girl but said they could be wrong because of leg placement. The doctor had tried 3 times to get a definite sex reading and always the same. She was a good Catholic girl even in utero, closed legs and a middle finger to the world. I was so nervous, I vomited. It was the big day; I was going to finally know the sex of our baby…our accidental, planning to plan love child. The image came up and we saw our baby in 3-D and I knew…we were ready. He was ready. He was happy. He was ECSTATIC. I had my answer, not about the sex of the baby but the answer to a much bigger question. Then Christmas came. I didn’t care what I received under the tree because I had already gotten my gift, three days earlier in the ultrasound room. I had gotten peace of mind. All the gifts were open and the Big Guy disappeared. Then he came back in with a huge, beautifully wrapped box and he placed it in front of me. “For me?” I asked. “No, it’s for the baby. I bought it a few months back to surprise you!” I opened the box and inside it was the most beautiful Burberry diaper bag that I had ever seen, through my tear filled eyes. He said, “a few months back”. I had worried for nothing. This is one of my favorite and most cherished holiday memories of all of my existence.

Study finds 10% of tweens, teens have 'sexted' (CNN) -- "Sexting" -- the practice of taking sexually explicit photos and sending them to peers via cell phones or the Internet -- may be less common among U.S. adolescents than previous research and media reports have suggested, according to a new nationwide study. In contrast to a widely cited 2008 survey in which 20% of teens reported sending or posting sexual pictures of themselves, the new survey -- in a younger group of Internet users, some as young as 10 -- found that only 10% of teens and tweens had done so. And just 1% reported sending or receiving nude or partly nude images. "It's still something that we need to talk to kids about, but not all kids are doing it," says Kimberly J. Mitchell, Ph.D., a study coauthor and a research associate professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham. "It's a bit reassuring, because a lot of the other studies about this have come up with much larger numbers." The new findings, which appear in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics, shouldn't be interpreted to mean that sexting isn't a serious problem, says Amanda Lenhart, a senior research scientist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in Washington, D.C. "Even if you look at 1% or 2% of kids in a high school of a thousand kids, that's 10 to 20 kids, and that's plenty of people for whom this is a big issue and for whom this is a troublesome problem in their lives," says Lenhart, who has researched teen sexting but was not involved in the new study. Continue reading: http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/05/health/teens-sexting/index.html?hpt=hp_bn10

Learning

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – After nearly three weeks, the Winter Olympics are over, and the world’s obsession with the Games will go on hold until the summer of 2012, when the circus will hit London. It’s been eventful trying to deliver the news, with varying degrees of success: I investigated whether the sport of curling was doomed due to the world’s supply of granite. I asked a man from the Netherlands why he skated in a skeleton outfit. I tried to find Swedish women to talk about Tiger Woods. I met athletes who deserve at least a sliver of the attention Tiger’s mistresses receive. http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=dw-winnerslosers022810&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

Worth it or not: A shopping Guide SmartMoney.com - We've all been there, standing in the aisle of a store, spending way too much time weighing the small differences between two similar products. Will the more expensive umbrella really perform better? When it comes to a laptop bag, is $120 too much, too little, or just right? Here's some help. Each month, SmartMoney Magazine looks at sets of two similar consumer products, and assesses the better buy. This year, we looked at a wide variety of goods, including blenders, deep fryers and Digital SLR cameras. To aid in your holiday shopping, here are seven suggestions: http://www.smartmoney.com/spend/family-money/worth-it-or-not-a-shopping-guide/

Hi my name is Jennifer, i am a mother to a 2 year old little girl named Kylie. I just left my previous parent forum due to all the drama and bashing, hopefully this place will be different. Although i liked being able to create your own topic over there so much more than having to search for somewhere to post.